Your Guide to the New Heroine TV: Supergirl and Jessica Jones

The ongoing "we need more female superheroes" pop-culture charge is erupting onto the small screen over the next few weeks: Supergirl, starring Melissa Benoist, premieres Monday on CBS. On November 20, Netflix will start streaming the first season of Jessica Jones, starring Krysten Ritter.

And it's not just a lot of network-level banter that inspired the timing for these shows. According to a study conducted by entertainment marketing firm Trailer Park in partnership with QC Strategy, people are truly clamoring for girl-in-cape protagonists: Apparently, as audiences get older, they start to prefer female superheroes over male ones—a switch that occurred among the survey sample at the 35-year-old mark. That may not be what execs courting the youngest millennials want to hear, but hey, in a time when all the best shows have female leads over 40, it makes sense to cater to an established audience.

In any case, science aside, the good news for viewers of all ages and gender identities is: Both of these shows are highly watchable. They're also very different, which is crucial—the superheroine trend will never grow legs if all the shows feel like the same watery imitations of each other. There's not a cheesy tagline or—as I feared—a broken stiletto foiling a chase sequence between these two shows. They're both worthy of your DVR's memory—and a spot in our hall of fame of most kick-ass television heroines ever—for very different reasons. Let's break it down:

THE BACKSTORY

Supergirl: Kara, a.k.a. Supergirl, is Kara Zor-El, cousin of Superman. As a young girl, she was sent to Earth by her parents and was raised by a regular family, hiding her supernatural powers. She works as an assistant at a newspaper (it's all very Devil Wears Prada), and in the pilot, she must use her supernatural abilities to prevent a major disaster.

Jessica Jones: Jones has a mysterious Major Dark Incident in her past that ended her stint as a superhero—now, she's working as a lone-wolf private investigator. She's called in on cases that involve or seem to involve mysteriously superhuman figures.

Supergirl: Kara is steely but everygirl adorable—she snorts when she laughs, she watches herself saving the world on the local news and geeks out.

Jessica Jones: Jessica is...not everygirl adorable. She's sulky and guarded and knows her way around a stiff drink. You can watch Kara with your little niece—Jessica, you might want to wait on until she's in college.

THE THEMES

Supergirl:Supergirl has a jazzy, Rosie-the-Riveter vibe: It's all girl power and inspiration. It shines with the history of the franchise—there's just something stirring about seeing a woman all done up in that red and blue gear—but also feels modern.

Jessica Jones:Jones is a dark show, closer to Watchmen or The Dark Knight than Avengers or The Amazing Spider-Man in comic-adaptation vibes. It's more of a boundary pusher—at least one male character from the source material was rewritten for a woman (Carrie-Ann Moss of The Matrix plays Jeri Hogarth, a lawyer Jones works with frequently.) There's also a very unfiltered sex scene in episode one, and the suggestion that Jones' sexuality is fluid.

Supergirl: TV veteran (Necessary Roughness, Desperate Housewives) and perennial best-smile winner Mehcad Brooks makes Kara go weak in the knees when he shows up at her day job office. Ostensibly, he's the new art director, but we get the sense he knows more about Kara than he's letting on.

Jessica Jones: Mike Colter is taking a quick break from playing the scary/scary hot Lemond Bishop on The Good Wife to play Luke Cage, who will eventually get his own Netflix series. For now, he's the bartender who catches Jessica's eye.

THE ACTION

Supergirl: The pilot contains a legit plane-lifting moment; while the action can border on cheesy, it's cool to see effects you normally have to head to the theater for.

Jessica Jones: Narrative-wise, Jones moves more slowly and is a bit more cerebral—don't hold your breath for extended, balletic fight scenes up front. This is a long game.

Supergirl: Kara's editrix boss, played by Calista Flockhart, clearly likes to get philosophical about feminism—and it's hinted that Kara's mother, played by Laura Benanti, certainly isn't the bit player she seems to be at first. With all these women pulling at different corners of Kara's universe, we're not worried about things devolving into long "does he like me?" chats.

Jessica Jones: The cast of Jones, too, is heavily female—it's thrilling watching Jones and Hogarth work together, and Rachael Taylor plays Jessica's BFF. What the show throws down in terms of suggesting Jessica's fragility, it backs up with a serious girl support system.